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Second Life has gotten a great deal of attention as a potential educational platform over the past several years, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a free virtual world with built-in voice and text chat, it’s highly customizable and open to user-created content, and it runs on even lower-end computers in Windows, Linux or the Mac OS. After several weeks of exploring this intriguing program and sampling some of the content it has to offer, I feel that the hype about Second Life’s potential is partly justified. However, the software as it currently exists is flawed in ways that limit its practical value for many online educational purposes.

The University of Arizona campus in Second Life

I approached Second Life as a skeptic. I had never used the program, but as someone who follows the video game industry closely, I had read a fair amount about it. Beginning around 2006, Second Life began appearing periodically in news stories or on blogs. Usually, the program would be mentioned when an established company or public figure decided to do something that might otherwise be mundane, but which was novel in the context of a virtual world. Eventually, virtual press conferences stopped making headlines, and many of the companies that had flocked to Second Life decided to cut their losses, having failed to discover a compelling reason for them to remain. More about this trend is available from InformationWeek and Wired.

Education is not business, of course, and I was committed to keeping an open mind when seeing what Second Life had to offer students and teachers. 21st-century skills are the educational buzzword of the day, and I believe strongly that virtual worlds can help build skills like collaboration, technological know-how, intellectual flexibility, multitasking and more.

Barriers to Entry

Some of the most important things to consider when evaluating the usefulness of any technology are the barriers to entry. Is the technology expensive? Is it hard to set up or maintain? How steep is the learning curve? If the barriers are too high, even technology with clear pedagogical advantages may not be worth using.

In the case of Second Life, many barriers to entry are quite low. The program itself is free, and users are under no obligation to spend money at any time. Virtual consumer goods including clothing items and hairstyles are available, as is virtual land, furniture, etc., but the experience is in no way limited for users who do not purchase these things. The cost of a computer capable of running the program could well prove an issue for many people, and this should be kept in mind. The hardware requirements are moderate, though, so even this cost is as low as could be expected for a comparable product.

Installation of the program was a snap on my Macintosh, as was account setup. Anyone with basic computer skills will be able to get at least as far as logging into the Second Life “grid.”

It’s Second Life’s learning curve that presents the first serious obstacles for the average person. As someone who grew up playing video games, I feel that I have a framework within which I can fairly evaluate Second Life’s ease of use and user interface. I’m used to creating and controlling avatars in 3D space—more significantly, I’m used to learning the quirks of such systems, the ways different games “want you to play.” Second Life is not a game, but it is extremely game-like in certain respects.

From a game design perspective, Second Life’s user interface is atrocious. Although I was expecting an elaborate tutorial upon my first login, I found nothing but a small island full of menu screens, most of which presented incredibly basic information about controlling my avatar. The toolbar at the bottom of the screen was fairly self-explanatory, but when I began to delve into the menu system to do things like explore other areas, I was confronted with a cluttered, unintuitive series of icons and abbreviations.

Even worse were my attempts to control my avatar. All the individual movements worked as advertise, but the feel of the controls as a whole left a great deal to be desired. The response time between pressing a key and seeing an onscreen action was noticeably delayed. This, combined with the spastic way my avatar was animated, kept me from feeling as immersed in the experience as I have in other massively multiplayer online experiences. The framerate was also a problem, with certain areas running smoothly, but others dipping into the single digits (30 frames per second is roughly the minimum for a smoothly animated image).

When I figured out how to get around by teleporting to other areas, popup alerts appeared to tell me that people and even automated scripts were trying to give me things. I’m not generally in the habit of clicking “Yes” to cryptic messages on the internet, but I eventually figured out that this was Second Life’s way of letting new areas present you with a welcome and orientation.

Overall, I was not impressed with the user experience in Second Life. I feel that the steep learning curve and confusing interface will make it difficult to use the technology as a platform for teaching anyone who isn’t already familiar with it or with similar online experiences.

Quality of Content and Ways to Use the Second Life Platform

The first thing I did after discovering how to teleport to different areas of Second Life was try to find something interesting to do in the world. Flying was not entertaining for very long, and I was craving some meaningful content to experience. Visiting the areas listed below demonstrated to me that there’s some truly engaging educational content available in Second Life. It also convinced me that there are good and bad ways to use Second Life to present information.

Here are some thoughts on the experiences I had in the various areas I visited.

ISTE Island

It’s not surprising that ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education, has a Second Life island. Content like podcasts, websites and newsletters were located in logical places around ISTE Island, and I found some good information and ideas in the ones that I perused. Honestly, I’d rather encounter these resources in a traditional website, which I find easier and much faster to navigate. Presenting things in both ways and letting your audience choose is probably preferable.

The island was nearly deserted, but I ran across a couple of other avatars and we fell into a conversation about our respective work as teachers and students interested in educational technology. This experience actually went a long way towards answering one of my major questions about Second Life: why not just hold educational meetings using wikis, forums or Skype instead? The answer I arrived at was that in a virtual world, you can encounter unexpected people and ideas in real time.

Sloodle

The Sloodle technology, which makes functions like chat, surveys and presentations cross-compatible between open source course management software Moodle and Second Life, is interesting. However, I found it much easier to find information about the technology by Googling it than by visiting the Sloodle space in Second Life. Part of the problem is that I’m on a wireless internet connection, which means that billboards with text sometimes take a very long time to load. This leaves me staring at a blurry image for up to a minute while I wonder why the program decided to load a tree or floor texture instead of the part of the world with writing on it.

This space was well-designed and fun to explore. It seemed to lead me from area to area, and I was impressed by the elegant way that objects with special functions were designed to draw my eye. I found myself wishing that a web browser was built into the program, however, so that I would not have to keep leaving Second Life to view interesting pages.

As the model for a virtual world library, this is a good start. I would never, ever visit a place like this as it currently exists, but I can certainly imagine a future in which I visit a virtual library and use a currency like Linden Dollars to download magazines or books to a device like the Amazon Kindle.

I ran into a strange technical glitch while walking upstairs in the library: my avatar got stuck in a “falling” animation for about 20 seconds until I figured out how to maneuver him off of the railing. This really drove home the fact that a lot of the interesting things I see being done in Second Life are done as much despite the terrible technology underlying the program as thanks to it.

EduIsland and SciLands

These are huge spaces. My old laptop was really chugging under the strain of exploring them, but I did find some interesting things. Both of these areas appear to be home to multiple education-related organizations, hence their status as networking locations.

While I did find some interesting Second Life-related organizations, particularly on EduIsland, the areas were so disorganized that I doubt I’ll ever visit again. The approach to presenting content that many organizations seem to take in Second Life is something like “Here is a bunch of architecture with random stuff tied to random objects throughout. Come wander around and click on everything until you find something useful.” I don’t think this works.

When I first signed up for Second Life, one of the first places I visited was the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I’ve always been interested in space, and I thought that exploring a virtual world had potential for museum experiences. Things like a sense of scale would carry over from the real world into a 3D environment, but there would also be the potential to go places and see things as an avatar that you never could in person.

Both the NASA JPL Lab and the International Spaceflight Museum did a great job of realizing the promise that I had hoped for. Cool stuff like rockets, satellites and meteors were there for the watching and exploring, and I was able to get up close and personal with technology that no one in their right mind would let me near in real life. It was this sense of being “wowed” that gave me my first clues to what makes an educational experience work in Second Life.

Real Life Education in Second Life

The first time I visited this region, it was empty. The second time, it was full of people whose avatars were decked out in crazy outfits (armor, robot suits, wielding weapons) and who were playing techno music and making racist jokes. Not interested.

University of Arizona, Educational Technology Program

This area was completely empty both times that I visited. I’ll wait until I’ve experienced a class meeting in Second Life before concluding whether areas like this are useful.

The museum’s Kristallnacht exhibit was haunting in a way that reminded me of visiting real-life battlefields like Gettysburg.

I think the best use of Second Life as an educational technology at the moment is in transporting avatars—and thereby users—into realistic environments that they could never visit in real life. This might mean historical spaces or events, the surface of the sun or the bottom of the ocean. A well-designed experience of this kind, with attention paid to details like providing contextual information on demand in text, photographs, video and sound, can be really powerful.

A Platform in Need of a Killer App

I see Second Life at the moment as a promising technological platform in search of a killer app—that single application of a new technology that demonstrates to the mainstream user why it is worth embracing. For the Apple II home computer, the killer app was the first spreadsheet program. For digital music, it was the iPod. I’m not sure what it will be for Second Life, but I suspect it will be an immersive narrative experience of either an artistic or educational bent.

In many ways, Second Life’s flexibility as a platform is a positive quality. It allows the world to be populated with content without requiring developer Linden Labs to create everything. This not only helps to keep Second Life free, but it also lets users customize their world and so become invested in it. On the other hand, 100 puzzle pieces created by 100 different people may not fit well together into a whole. Second Life lacks a cohesive vision—like a mansion built by amateur carpenters, it’s confusing to navigate and ugly to look at.

Finally, I find the absence of any discernable goals in Second Life to be a problem. There’s no way to advance or improve my character, and nothing to keep me exploring aside from simple curiosity. This is the aspect of Second Life that is distinctly un-game-like. Other MMOs, most of which are games, have reward systems built in that encourage players to spend time in the world by breaking tasks like exploration into discrete “quests” with concrete in-game rewards. I feel the lack of this kind of motivation keenly in Second Life.

I do acknowledge that many newcomers to the environment perceive SL to have a ‘steep learning curve’. Oddly, I personally never experienced it that way, even though I am not a gamer.

Second Life requires a lot of patience and perseverance, and I think it is important to reiterate this again and again when dealing with new users and while ushering a group of newbies around the environment for the first few times. How long did it take to learn to walk and talk in your first life? I am sure you will agree that navigating Second Life is a piece of cake by comparison and much much quicker!

Just because it is possible to do something does not mean that you have to be doing it within your first two hours in Second Life. In fact, I believe that the challenges of the platform can make it engrossing and fun. Aha!-moments tend to occur when you least expect them: how fabulous to accidentally discover a new feature while playing and interacting with the environment and its residents! My advice to new users is to take time to persevere with it and learn from the experience. If all else fails, ask another resident for advice. Find a mentor to guide you. Mastering something and then finally being able to pass that knowledge or skill on to a new resident is what makes the environment truly rewarding!

I agree with you on the points you raise with regards to content. Many traditional university campuses, especially the ones that resemble their bricks and mortar counterparts, are empty and quiet unless there is an event taking place. You can literally stroll through the world of Second Life for hours and even with 50,000 users or more logged in, you might not bump into a single soul if you just aimlessly wander. Many who try this approach give up disappointed.

Finding things, too, is a problem many users voice: the search facility rarely proves useful when searching for content. Why is it so difficult? Lets change the angle slightly: these days, we tend to measure the usefulness of a search facility by Google’s standards. However, SL search is not Google! Instead, it needs to be understood as a service much like a telephone directory: it works best when you look for people or groups. Find the people and take it from there.

It is all too often forgotten that Second Life is all about the people who inhabit it. As Paul Cohen rightly points out in his comment, SL is first and foremost a communications platform. It excels at serendipitous meetings and at bringing together global communities and interest groups in one place. Their knowledge is the true content; their networks are the most efficient (re)search facility. There is always someone who knows someone who knows someone who…

The rest is eye candy at best and the horrid mansion you describe at worst. An array of 3D shapes that makes tangible someone’s creativity, their thoughts and understanding of something. Sometimes a creator’s 3D representation of a concept may not make a lot of sense without guidance. However, most content creators, especially in the education community, are more than happy to take the time and walk interested parties through their spaces. My advice would be to contact them for information. You never know, you may find another valuable connection in the network.

As you rightly say in your post, in some cases SL works well to illustrate ideas, concepts, experiences and places; in other instances the traditional 2D web is a much better tool for the job. I believe that Second Life has its uses in education, but probably also requires a certain mindset in order to be perceived as truly valuable. Unrealistic user expectation is one of its biggest barriers. The other is a mindset of passive consumption. Second Life really is user generated: you only get out of the environment what you are prepared to contribute in terms of 3D shapes or ideas or connections or feedback or simply a contribution of time and support for new users.

Finally, I cannot help but being curious: are you referring to the old SLOODLE HQ at virtuALBA or are your observations based on our new presence on SLOODLE Island? As one of the main builders of the new space, I would welcome your feedback on how we could improve it to make it an even better user experience. Given the opportunity, I would gladly take you on a tour of the space. Please feel free to contact me if you would like to arrange a meet up.

I realize that Second Life is not intended to be an MMOG. There are some things that MMOGs do well that SL does poorly, though, and I think there’s potential for cross-pollination. For example, SL does not do a good job of impressing users and thereby encouraging them to become invested in the platform by exposing them to high-quality content. One possible solution would be to build a game-like “achievement” system into the platform that could encourage exploration by congratulating users for seeing new things that Linden considers worth seeing.

The steep learning curve of SL is exacerbated by the lousy design of the orientation area, and here’s another opportunity for improvement that could be drawn from games. Newly created avatars could be dropped into a scripted instance that walks them through the basic functions of the game, rather than being unceremoniously deposited on an island and expected to figure it out for themselves (which was how I felt).

These are just minor examples, but I hope you take my point that SL doesn’t need to evolve in an entirely separate ecosystem just because it’s “not a game.”

Gia, I appreciate your passion for SL as a platform. As a Mac user from the ’90s (a time both after and before Apple was cool), I understand what it’s like to see the good in something that isn’t universally acclaimed. You’re right that we shouldn’t expect instant expertise, and you’re right that we should learn to use the SL search based on how it—not how Google—works. The problem isn’t that these functions in SL are totally broken, it’s that they’re badly designed and badly implemented. They stand as obstacles when they should be aides instead.

Regarding issues of “where the content lies” in SL, I think we’re all in agreement that content is king. Without something meaningful for to see, do, read, explore or otherwise engage with, there’s no reason to spend time on any activity, virtual worlds included. I suppose I haven’t found a network of people whose knowledge can serve as content for me; that’s an interesting idea, and it hadn’t really occurred to me in that way.

Ultimately, different people will be looking for different things from platforms like SL. Some people will want to use SL for professional and intellectual networking, and it’s probably great for that. But others want content in a more “concrete,” asynchronous form than avatar-to-avatar interaction. There should be something for users to do, even if they’re alone in SL.

Some people will want to become part of the fabric of a community that they can contribute to… but most people probably do want to consume content passively, at least part of the time. Good systems for managing and promoting user-created content understand this, and “push” the best content to these passive users.